Category: Geekery

  • Satisfactory: I Lumen-ate

    On Tuesday, the 14th of November, 2023 the 8th major update to Satisfactory arrived in Early Access, after spending months in the Experimental branch to shake out the worst of the bugs… most of them, anyway. We have a few things to talk about with “U8” but today we’re going to focus primarily on the new engine’s support for something called “Lumen” and how that makes an already-pretty game even prettier.

    I took this screenshot within the first two minutes of enabling Lumen while at the Final Destination site. Just a purely random view and it shows off the new lighting so well! Dang this game’s pretty.
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  • The State Of Games – Late Oct 2023

    I’m passing a lot of my time playing games lately, a mix of new and really-very-old. Let’s run down the list a bit, shall we?

    Not visible in this screenshot: All the stuff I crammed into too tiny of a space. Out of sight, out of mind!
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  • Kafka Says Boom

    I needed to get OBS Studio and Davinci Resolve installed on the new computer anyway, and what better way to incentivize myself than the wild hair of an idea which led to…

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  • Satisfactory: Final Destination

    I haven’t written much about my current solo game progress, largely because most of it’s been very, very boring. That’s not to say I’m having a dull time of it, just that there’s not much to report here which is worth the reading.

    I didn’t route this rail line directly under Mothra’s flight path on purpose, it’s just a happy accident.

    I’m making progress, though.

    To sum up:

    1. I’m working on what I’m calling the “Final Destination” project, a factory which makes all four of the last space elevator shipment products in one location. (This may not have been my wisest decision.) Remember the flowchart? Yeah, I’m referencing that a lot.
    2. To do this, I needed to make a whole bunch of new factories making enough of things I already made but in too small of quantities previously. For instance, I lost most of September to building a high-output Battery facility.
    3. The rail network needed expansion and better interconnection to effectively route materials to-and-fro.
    4. Building the FD site the way I’ve chosen to has resulted in the occasional “whoops, that’s not gonna work,” so I spend a lot of time figuring out some other better way.

    Today I can happily report that the initial production run of Magnetic Field Generators has commenced. Delivery is a whole other issue, as the receiving drone ports at the Space Elevator simply do not exist yet, but when the time comes I’ll have a bunch of parts ready to send up.

    Catching the rays of the evening sun out in the Dune Desert, here’s the “barn” in which one of the final shipment products gets made.

    Next session I’ll need to decide which of the other three products to proceed with. Part of me wants to jump right into the Nuclear Pasta because that’s what uses those super-cool Particle Accelerators… but given their positioning (up above the other three production areas) it’d be smarter to complete the other two first. So I’ll probably do that.

    I’m honestly not sure what I’m going to do once this project is all finished. Maybe it’ll be time for a fresh start. Maybe something slightly less dependent upon rail networks.

    Maybe.

  • Revisiting An Old Friend: Skyrim

    Oh, the hours I sunk into this game, a decade or so ago.

    Someone on a friend’s Discord brought up “Nolvus,” one of the mod pack manager bundle thingies (technical terms? what’s the fun in using those?) for Skyrim and how it made them want to revisit the game again and I thought… why not? Surely, after the better part of a dozen years, the Skyrim experience has been perfected and polished.

    Well.

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  • How I Spent My End-of-Summer Vacation

    I took a few days off. I didn’t have any particular reason nor much in the way of goals (though I had some of those, mostly unmet). My boss keeps reminding me that I use the least PTO of all employees so, here I am, having burned a few days’ worth.

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